Tom Steyer for California

I don’t like writing about Democratic primaries, and I don’t like writing about people I know. But I’m voting for Tom Steyer, and I’m going to tell you why because I know a lot of California voters — including a surprising number of political professionals — are still trying to decide who to vote for, and because some of my thinking about this primary is relevant elsewhere.

First, I have some disclosures to get out of the way. I worked for Tom Steyer at NextGen Climate/NextGen America for four years, from the summer of 2015 until the summer of 2019. During that time, I got to know him and his politics fairly well. I am proud of much of the work we did and that he allowed me to do. He drove me crazy at times, and I am certain I did the same to him. When he announced his presidential campaign I passed up a good job on his campaign because I wasn’t interested in working on a candidate campaign and because I did not want him to win the Democratic presidential primary. That was partially because I already had a preferred candidate: Elizabeth Warren, who I still believe to be the best Democratic presidential primary option of my lifetime. I wasn’t willing to get up every morning and go to work against her, even if we didn’t have much chance of winning and wouldn’t be campaigning against her. All of that said, it was a difficult decision for me: I like Tom personally and respect the work he has done to make California and America better for their residents.

More broadly: I have for more than two decades had a very strong preference for electing women and people of color rather than candidates who look like me, and I am generally loathe to give any billionaire more power.

You can decide for yourself whether all of that makes me biased in favor of Tom’s gubernatorial candidacy or against it. I’m still not sure myself, but it’s background you should know.

I don’t like writing or talking about Democratic primaries because to me the stakes, while high, do not justify the increasingly toxic fervor that accompanies them. Primaries are important and can play a significant role in setting the direction the party takes, and that is a topic on which I have generally had strong views for the last several decades. But the extreme factionalism that social media has promoted throughout society has helped turn Democratic primaries into death matches in which each side convinces itself their candidate is above reproach and the other is beneath contempt. None of this is unique to any side or faction within the broader Democratic/progressive landscape, by the way. It is common among the center-left and the left-left; among institutionalists and those who favor deep structural change. The animosity and distrust that accompany this is toxic and corrosive to our ability to ultimately form a majority coalition. And this is not accidental: We’ve seen ample evidence over the last decade of right-wing provocateurs and hostile foreign actors using phony social media accounts posing as Democrats to sow discord and division among us.

So if you’re looking for someone to convince you that one candidate is the best thing since sliced bread or another candidate is an unmitigated disaster, keep looking. Primaries are rarely that simple, and Eric Swalwell is already out of the race. Xavier Becerra, Katie Porter, and Tom Steyer would all probably be pretty good governors; each would be far from perfect.

The next governor of California is going to have to deal with at least one and likely multiple truly existential challenges: climate change; a cold civil war (at least) with the Trump administration and Republican-led states on one side and states with Democratic leaders on the other; possible economic collapse; another pandemic; big tech companies playing Russian roulette with the very fabric of society in their unquenchable lust for scale and power; and more.

I’m voting for Tom Steyer because of the candidates running I have the greatest confidence that he understands the magnitude of the challenges we face and is willing to confront them.

In the early days of the first Trump presidency, Steyer was one of the first prominent Democrats to say Trump should be impeached. When too many Democrats (and journalists) were unwilling to admit to themselves or say out loud who Trump was and what he was doing, Tom did.

When Tom announced he was running for president in 2019 and I decided not to work on his campaign, the first client I took on was Take Back The Court, a fledgeling organization advocating a then-obscure solution to the right-wing’s illegitimate domination and use of the Supreme Court: Expanding and rebalancing the Court. Though few were saying it at the time, it was obvious that unless Democrats swiftly expanded and rebalanced the Court at their first opportunity, the Court would continue dismantling American democracy and imposing a deeply unpopular far-right agenda on the nation. That 2020 field included candidates with decades of experience on the Senate Judiciary Committee, so-called revolutionaries, policy wonks – it was probably the deepest, most experienced and impressive Democratic presidential primary field of my lifetime. And Tom Steyer was the only one of them who said directly and unequivocally that the Supreme Court should be expanded and rebalanced. I was glad that someone said it, but it was bittersweet that the only full-throated support for SCOTUS expansion came from the candidate I chose not to work for, while the candidate who I thought best understood the nature of the challenges we face and the solutions necessary to address them – Elizabeth Warren – remained on the fence.¹ Democrats won control of the White House and Congress in 2020 and left Supreme Court in the hands of its illegitimate right-wing supermajority, which used its power to thwart the Biden agenda, overturn Roe v Wade, further gut the Voting Rights Act, and pave the way for Donald Trump’s return to the presidency by exempting him from the constitution’s prohibition on insurrectionists winning office. We would be immeasurably better off today if more Democrats understood what Tom Steyer understood in 2020.

I’m voting for Tom Steyer because he genuinely likes and cares about people. He sees and celebrates the humanity in others, and this drives his approach to politics and governing. The money Tom has spent over the last fifteen years on campaigns to protect California’s environment, close corporate tax loopholes, provide every public school student two free meals a day, and reform California’s criminal justice system has gotten all the attention – justifiably so – but few people know that Tom wasn’t just writing checks and running a sophisticated lobbying operation. He spent all those years traveling the state, meeting and working with community activists, organizers, and everyday Californians, talking to them, listening to their hopes and dreams and concerns. He did that because it was important to understand how public policy could help people, but he also did it because he loves it.

Watch this clip of Tom last week, starting at the 7:34 mark (if I’ve embedded this video correctly, it should be cued to the correct spot):

“Everybody’s nice to you 90 percent of the time. Every politician is going to say ‘Mom, apple pie, the flag. I’m absolutely 100 percent behind those things. What you need is the person in the 10 percent of the time when it’s not popular to say. And so, you know, I think it’s critical – you talked about trans people. I’m totally in favor of trans athletes in high school. I think when you understand the vulnerability, the stress, the danger of being a trans kid, and you understand that almost half of them try to commit suicide. And then you think we’re going to punish those kids. We're going to cut them off from team sports. We’re going to cut them off from participating in the community. We’re going to cut them off from fun. It’s like, no, we’re not. No, we’re not. As someone who played sports my whole life and loves sports and loves playing sports, there are more important things than whether you start on your high school basketball team. And that is standing up for people who are under a threat of death.”

That’s Tom. He isn’t hedging or hiding his position or calibrating it to a poll. He’s just being a decent human who cares about other people. Here you can watch Steyer and Xavier Becerra both answering a question about trans people last December:

One of those candidates has a clear stance rooted in compassion, empathy, and decency. The other tries to hide behind legalese he doesn’t even seem to understand, despite having been California’s Attorney General. I know a lot of people might not agree with Tom’s position, or might still be working out how they feel about trans people playing high school sports. But at least you know where he stands and why.

I’m voting for Tom Steyer because he is not afraid of hard fights. He’s taken on tobacco companies, oil companies, utilities — some of the most powerful special interests in California and America. When I was at Steyer’s NextGen America we ran clean energy ballot initiatives in three states in 2017-2018 — and we intentionally chose tough states, not easy ones: Michigan, which had just voted for Trump; Nevada, which Trump narrowly lost, and Arizona, which Trump won. In all three states we took on big utility companies, including Arizona, where APS probably enjoyed stronger control over the state’s politics than any other utility anywhere in America. We chose these states because accelerating the transition to clean energy there would have substantive benefits. And we chose them because they were tough fights we were unlikely to sweep. We wanted to show that you could take on powerful utility companies and win, and that there was an appetite for transitioning away from dirty, expensive fossil fuels and towards affordable and healthy clean energy. In Michigan the threat of our ballot initiative led to a deal with the state’s utilities. In Nevada we won our ballot initiative. In Arizona polls showed our initiative had a strong chance of passing even in the face of massive APS spending until the state’s then-attorney general Mark Brnovich (the Brnovich in the Brnovich v DNC case that weakened the Voting Rights Act), unilaterally inserted APS talking points into the ballot language in a way that doomed our chances.

When I began leaning towards voting for Tom in the gubernatorial primary and wanted a check on that to ensure I wasn’t letting my personal experience with him bias my thinking, I found Rebecca Solnit’s writing about Steyer and the primary extremely valuable. Solnit is a brilliant and prolific writer and thinker I have long admired. She is a strong progressive, a passionate and knowledgable advocate for climate solutions and a more just society. Two of her recent pieces are well worth your time: “The Case for Climate Champion Tom Steyer in the California Governor's Race” and “Hey California! What Does It Take to Be Governor?”

Xavier Becerra has been a solid progressive for decades. In every one of his terms in congress his voting record placed him in the more progressive half of the Democratic caucus. If he becomes governor of California, he will likely be a fairly progressive governor overall. But I don’t think he’ll be a transformational governor, and on some of the most important questions facing the state I fear he will fall short.

Climate change is a big one. I have some sympathy for Becerra’s statements about Californians needing fossil fuels, particularly lower-income Californians who can’t just go out and buy a new electric car. But Becerra took that too far when he insisted Chevron “is not the bad guy. You need Chevron. I need Chevron.”

The reason that Californians still rely on oil companies that are making California dirtier and more expensive is that those same oil companies have spent gobs of money for decades blocking and slowing the transition to clean, affordable energy — much of it on misinformation campaigns aimed at the public and lobbying and campaign contributions aimed at politicians. It should not be a defense of Chevron to say we need them; it should be a recognition that they are currently holding us hostage. A politician who doesn’t understand that — who doesn’t understand that, yes, Chevron is very much the bad guy — will never free us of our dependence on scarce, dirty, expensive fossil fuels. And we will all pay the price for their lack of understanding, in the form of an increasingly unhealthy environment and prices that will continue to rise as our energy needs increase and the finite supply of fossil fuels decreases.

Xavier Becerra would probably be a pretty good governor on environmental issues. His congressional voting record earned him a lifetime score of 91 from the League of Conservation Voters. Anyone trying to portray him as the greatest threat to the environment this side of Mitch McConnell is full of shit. But when it comes to the air we breathe and the water we drink, Californians shouldn’t have to settle for “pretty good” and we shouldn’t have to settle for a governor who doesn’t know whose side Chevron is on.

We could argue all day and all night about by how much Xavier Becerra’s environmental accomplishments (and there are many) outweigh his shortcomings (and there are too many) but this really isn’t complicated. Big oil and utility companies enjoy immense profits and political power in large part because they are really good at knowing which politicians will be with them when it matters most. They spend a ton of time and money developing this expertise. And they have decided Xavier Becerra is their best ally among the Democrats running for governor, and Tom Steyer is their greatest foe. We should trust them on this, if on nothing else. (If that makes you feel icky, you could instead trust the major environmental groups and leaders who have come to the same conclusion.)

My other primary concern with Becerra is I think he would govern like a fairly standard progressive Democrat. And there’s nothing “standard” about the times we are living through. We need leaders who understand the scale and stakes of the threats posed by an authoritarian federal government and red-state attacks on our sovereignty require bold, creative solutions. I think Steyer is more likely to meet that standard than is Becerra.

When this race began, I expected to vote for Katie Porter. I supported her Senate campaign, and I hope to support her again in the future. But I cannot vote for her in this race because of a tax proposal that is terrible policy and makes me question the things that drew me to her in the first place.

Porter’s tax plan is fundamentally unserious pandering that reinforces right-wing anti-government sentiments and, if enacted, would further erode the perception of government as a collective responsibility that is central to our ability to provide for the common good. It is deeply antithetical to my understanding of how government should work in both theory and practice. And it is irreconcilable with Katie Porter’s carefully cultivated reputation for being smart, serious, and tough, which gives me concerns about what her core principles actually are.

The centerpiece of Porter’s tax plan is simple: “I will work to eliminate state income tax for Californians making under $100,000.” That is the only specific tax policy on her campaign’s “Priorities” page (she also promises to “launch a Progressive Corporate Tax” — yes please! — but offers only a vague illustrative example of what that might look like.) And it is a very bad idea.

Life in America in general and California in particular is increasingly unaffordable for most Americans. But that’s mostly because things are too damn expensive, not because taxes are too high. The way to solve that is to make things less expensive, not to create a mechanism for people to spend more money. Individual Californians spending more money will just drive up costs.

The way to make life more affordable is to take advantage of the economies of scale that we can achieve collectively but not individually. That means increasing tax revenue and using taxes to create and fund a robust set of public goods that would be far more expensive if we each paid for our portion individually. Highways, schools, food safety inspections, hospitals — these things and more are all much cheaper for us to pay for collectively. If we want to make California more affordable, we need to make health care and housing less expensive, and the way to do that is collectively funding an increase in supply (and eliminate the need for intermediaries like health insurance companies), not giving people more money to spend on limited supply.

What we actually need is an aggressively progressive tax code that ensures wealthy people and corporations pay a much higher tax rate than working class people coupled with significant increase in spending on public goods to take advantage of economies of scale and reduce per-person costs for basic needs we all share. As a basic matter of math we probably can’t do that without collecting any income taxes from the roughly fifty percent of Californians who make less than $100,000.

But it isn’t just a matter of math. There is deep civic importance in having a shared understanding that we’re all in this together. Exempting half the state from income taxes actively works against that essential communal spirit. It reinforces right-wing everyone-for-themselves attitudes that funding the government is bad and people shouldn’t have to do it. It adds weight to right-wing rhetoric that people don’t deserve public goods if they “don’t pay any taxes.”

I bet Katie Porter knows all this. None of it is a novel or new concept. I’m not breaking any new ground here. She knows all of this, but she’s pandering anyway. Now, all politicians pander from time to time. But there are differences in degree and in kind. There’s pandering that is about something relatively unimportant and that reinforces good impulses and true understanding of how things work. Katie Porter’s tax plan is pandering about something that is extremely important, and it reinforces false understanding of how things work and plays into deeply regressive views of government and society. It is the worst kind of pandering.

I’m focusing on Katie Porter here because I’m writing about the California Democratic gubernatorial primary, but it is important to note that Katie Porter is not alone in peddling this deeply unserious and actively harmful proposal to eliminate all income taxes on Californians who make less than $100,000. Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton proposed it last year. For decades, Republican tax policies have driven up our debt, hamstrung our government’s ability to provide for the common good and make life more affordable by taxing advantage of economies of scale, and driven home a message that collective responsibilities and goods are bad. Republicans should not be our role models when it comes to tax policy. Or anything else.

For my entire life, the core of the Republican Party’s economic agenda has been dressing up the upward distribution of wealth as populism. Under the guise of cutting taxes and costs for working people, they have distorted the tax code to favor the wealthiest Americans, shifted costs away from businesses and the wealthy and on to consumers, weakened the social safety net and starved public goods of essential funding. Because the Republican Party has successfully sold so many Americans on the false promise of a better life through tax cuts, America has worse roads and bridges and more expensive college and health care, all while our billionaires have amassed obscene wealth and power that frees them from accountability for their actions and responsibility to their fellow citizens whose work and consumption make their wealth possible.

There’s a reason Hilton is proposing this tax plan, and it’s the same reason Republicans always talk about tax cuts: To hoodwink the middle class into hollowing out America’s infrastructure and social welfare programs, leaving each of us to fend for ourselves — a condition that benefits only the megarich oligarchs who can afford private schools and personal helipads. The only question is why Katie Porter supports it. I can think of a few answers. All of them are bad.

Finally, while I generally despise “strategic” primary voting,² California’s dumb top-two primary model forces us into such considerations. And the simple reality is that at this point Katie Porter is extremely unlikely to finish in the top two.

If the result of this primary is a general election choice between Steve Hilton and either Xavier Becerra or Katie Porter, the choice will be incredibly easy. Either Becerra or Porter would likely be a good governor, and I would support them in such a campaign without reservation. But I think Tom Steyer has a better chance – not a certainty, but a better chance – of being a great governor, and that’s what we need right now.

¹ Warren announced her support for Supreme Court expansion in December 2021.

² For a whole lot of reasons I might elaborate on soon, but I’m already at 3,743 words and nobody has time for that now.